In cloud services, applications are increasingly run on virtual machines. When run on virtual machines, the applications run on top of operating systems that run on the virtual machines. Often, a single application is run on a virtual machine, where communication between applications running on different virtual machines is done over a network. In such a scenario, many of the elements provided by the traditional operating system are not needed to run the application. These unneeded portions of the operating system lead to the inefficient use of computing resources that may negatively impact the performance of the application, and further provide potential vectors for attacking the virtual machines. Accordingly, there is an ongoing need for systems and techniques capable of efficiently and securely running applications.